Tamir Khason – Just code

The truth about HTC has been revealed!

HTC is underground factory, that manufacturing cat eater cyborgs (Cats? Why Cats? Don’t you know, what PDA is? It’s Pussy Defended Asset. Other words male mouser). Especially, those cyborgs eat cats is disguise of Mobile Phones.

Where HTC located?

HTC located on the moon. Not in China. The facility is in one of moon craters inside the old spacecraft, abandoned by HAL from a space odyssey. Once a year, this moonbus rides to the Earth with new cyborgs production on board.

HTC production

At glance, the production of HTC looks like a regular mobile phones, however it has no phone capabilities. Therefore, once it leaves moonbus it eats fist mobile phone found. Momentarily after, cyborg’s internal infrastructure adopts the consumed cat and starts to operate as long as life endures, producing the illusion, that the cyborg is regular mobile phone.

However, the main mission of HTC production is to eat cats. It do the offense nightly, when the owner sleeps. It comes out and every time, seeing a cat, exclaims: “Hey, That’s Cat!”, then swallows the victim. Once the cyborg loaded up, it return to the owner.

The other ability of HTC production is zombying of its owners. It washes their brains and commands them to think, that cyborgs are the best mobile phone ever. All other phones are missing of features and very user unfriendly. Because of it, most of mobile phone owners forgot how to use regular mobile phones.

Cyborg detection

In spite of good camouflage, it’s possible to detect cyborgs:

• Occasional pressing of phone screen does nothing for regular mobile phones, however cyborgs very sensitive to this action
• Upper cover of the cyborg consists of strange rectangle thing. It’s the antenna, used by the cyborg for zombying owners.
• One of following words might appear in cyborg’s front or back panel: i-mate,t-mobile,eten,asus,htc,orange,AT&T
• Sustained use of cyborgs causes headache or migraine.

The cyborgs are extremely dangerous for cat population of the Earth, thus every time, you detect the cyborg, please, report to WWF, Heath Officer or FBI.

Thank you for cooperation.

[illustration by DaKraken, inspired by absurdopedia]

June 17th, 2008 · Comments (2)

Microsoft future healthcare vision – boom, biga boom UX troubles…

About a week ago, Microsoft healthcare division put a lot of money into their future vision. The results are: cool SF promo, real big UX troubles. Let’s try to understand why

Fellow young pre-diabetic girl runs somewhere in wide, while big physiologist brother is watching her on 15” e-paper monitor with big box for something over it. He also typing on rubber keyboard in his table. Good idea, especially if he has coffee, that can split to it.

He has only 5 qualified patients to follow and their are not sorted anyhow. But who cares, maybe in the future we’ll have 20% of physiologists in the world.

In the future we’ll not have standard keyboards. All of them will be flat and chunky with huge circle in upper right corner instead of Enter (have you ever tried to blind type with absolutely flat keyboard? I’m suffering from this every day with my Windows Mobile.

But who cares about flat keyboards, when we’ll charge business cards and have only IPhones at home. We do not really have to use it as music player for jogging. Ah, and other thing, all our power supplies will be wireless, but we still need plates to put all devices into.

Wee! We’ll have Vista start button in upper left corner. Under it we’ll have some kind of mail client and them Internet Explorer. Well call button will be the smallest one in bottom left. Also, the default screen of our mobile phones will show cool graphs.

But phone is still small device, we’ll have to turn it in order to switch TV on. Also we’ll have huge tumbler button (flat) to do something useful with TV.

When we’ll want to see good film, one of our physiologists will appear from inside email message to show us two really useful graphs of  “Qualifying range” of something. Also we are not really using email (we have only 5 messages for 3 month). Another problem is computer clock it seemed to be very broken (weather outside is very very good for 12 February). Please take a look onto user interface – emails without words, but very useful search block (we have no keyboards, remember) and Windows with IE hot buttons.

Hospital

Endocrinologist Christian Kemp is very new there, thus he need map to find the way out. Well’, let’s take into account, that he has a lot of work and computer builds routing path for him. But why to go through the walls?

A moment after we’re understand why. This is the hospital for aliens from Men in Black II – green small aliens. So we should watch not to step over them. Also, the map on device shows absolutely different place. Treasure island?

Even worth is to be patient. You should see front view of driving cars and all Medication Reminders. When the reminder appears, it has fast forward, fast backward and pause buttons (you have click it very quick – the car will stop, but reminder remains, so you have no way out). Maybe if we’ll not have medication on time those cars become real and ride over us.

The bad news is, that all drugs looks absolutely the same. The only difference is the color of ellipse under it. If you’re suffering of daltonism, you’ll dead!

But this is not all. You have to move tube for perception to appear. Then all you have to do it to click it, wait, that take it again and take drug. Extremely user friendly technology.

 Then, when endocrinologist finally found us he should look for something very strange. However X-rays of his device always how the exact place of his stuff. Wait a minute! It was 3:12 PM when we begun the hide and seek with Christian. It was 3:14 PM when the patient took his drug. Now Christian’s devices shows 3:12 PM again. Well another broken clock. Also his device has small horizontal and vertical offset. Also it makes another things to appear. Look into right upper corner of the imag

How Christian had to go out for smoking with the device. It’s 3:24 PM, when he begun to check Alex Roland’s eye. Also instead of looking into monitor near Alex’s bed (where car was), Christian trying to look into the hole in opposite side of the tube device he found. What he smoked?

Finally the doctor found anomaly and adjust something with stylus to show Alex. Now he (Alex), probably know his chances to be cured.

Now in his room, all Chris has to do is to shrink something to turn 67.8% of effectiveness into 84.2%. Very cool, especially when all other numbers (at right) had not been changed.

Now they should told the girl from the first scene about her chances. Well, all of them already know about her. More, then this they used Alex’s eye test results to make the right decision (everything happens momentarily, it’s 8:24 PM in device’s clock).

Now all we have to do is to turn off everyone and put doctor’s device to changing on cabinet door. The battery is really low (about 80%) and no one cares about patients privacy. A moment after the battery is full again, but device turned into door sign.

Now the girl come to visit the doctor (he told, her, that she has about 80% of chances not to see cars near hospital bed). But in order to be identified and get right directions, she should not wash her hands for a while. This way thumbprint scanning will work.

Then she should choose what card to use. Really strange is not the card the same?

Now just swipe a card to get directions (we already identified twice)?

Not really, now we have to type something. We’ll we have not. It types itself.

Now first “OK” will confirm our details (don’t we really know it?) Then we should choose why we come here.  This “mini-hospital” provides only four types of services: Flu diagnosis (very important in sunny February), hemoglobin A1C (that’s why she here), Mononucleosis (abnormal increase of while blood cells in blood) and pregnancy testing. All this for $25 only. Cool hospital.

But actually she does not need tests. She already has prescription for 80mg oral hypoglycemic for $20 only. Thus she can pay immediately. Wait don’t she need to change cards in wallet? The machine become smarter.

Now all she has to do is to find way out (do you remember labyrinths in this hospital?)

Very cool CF film, but it’s very unreal and prognoses us bad User Experience in the future…

Have a nice day and be good people.

June 7th, 2008 · Comments (8)

Special for Guitar Hero fans – how to win (96% Cliffs of Dover) in expert mode?

Do not believe it’s possible? You can! Build robot. Here how it works in video.

via

May 2nd, 2008 · Comments (1)

Computer languages and facial hair – take two

About four years ago, I wrote an article about relationship between facial hair and computer languages success (this is cached page, the original article has been lost). Today, I want to recall this article and see what happened with my theory.

Let’s start from Fortran, Ada and Simula. Fortran inventor, John Backus, died in Oregon last year. Ada inventor, Jean Ichbiah died three months earlier from brain cancer in Paris. Kristen Nygaard, the father of Simula, died of a heart attack. Let’s pause to remember those giants.

What’s about F#? His inventor, Dr. Don Syme has neither beard, nor moustaches. Thus it looks like there is no real future expected to this language

What happens with Prolog inventor, Alain Colmerauer? He still has no beard. This means, that the great future is not expected to Prolog as well.

Let’s see what’s going on with C? Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie and Kenneth L. Thompson. They are fine. Still have very good bears, so C has long long life. Currently this computer language is used in 16% of open source projects (according SourceForge)

Next in row – Smalltalk aka Alan Curtis Kay. He has moustaches today, but no one really using Smalltalk. What’s the problem? He’s Flex concept got small bust those days. But all problems around Flex concept are stopping it from being very popular in real life.

Objective – C – Brad Cox. It does not look like he has at least moustaches those days. Even his Java+ concept faded in past

C++ still about 18% of industry, however it seemed like C++ just disappears from from computer horizons. Let’s try to understand why. Just compare Bjarne Stroustrup’s facial hair at the beginning of C++ gold era

A couple of years ago

And those days

Don’t you see the real degradation of his beard and moustaches? Bjarne, throw your shaver out of window and fast to save C++!

Now let’s see what’s going on with Thomas E. Kurtz, the inventor of Basic. When he has those moustaches BASIC was the language of simple yet not very effective programming

However, today this light weigh language losing it’s popularity (less then 2% of the industry). This why:

What’s about Perl, that still holding more, than 6% of industry? Larry Wall, keep those grand moustaches!

Now my favorite – Ruby and Python. Last year two those languages become super popular in web environment. Has anything changed in their inventors facial hair? Both Van Rossum (Python) and Yukihiro Matsumoto (Python) got beards. BTW, Matz did it because of my article (see comments). Keep doing!

But what’s going on with C# and Java? Anders Hejlsberg still has neither beard, nor moustache, thus it’s after four years, the industry share of C# is around 4%, while James Gosling’s beard got better within 18% of open source projects

What’s next? There are some new languages in horizon. There are no really new, but there are new concepts, like RubyCLR with Sam Ramji, that looks like has small chances to be really popular

As well as Scott Guthrie with WPF and Silverlight (well it’s not really him, but other architects in Microsoft are not much hairy)

JSON (aka JSLint) with Douglas Crockford has very good chances. Keep doing, Douglas.

When IronPython (and other DLR-based languages) are hard to see see good chances for Jim Hugunin

Let’s take a look into functional and modular modern languages such as Haskell. Its arch-fathers Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak  and Philip Wadler neutralize one each other, so, it’s very hard to predict it’s fortune. However if we’ll normalize their hair we can get very good chances for Haskell.

Last time, I completely forgot about PHP by Rasmus Lerdorf. This language is rather popular and it is not because of it’s nature. See Rasmus face to understand why.

To summarize, it’s looks like my old assumption is still valid, even for new languages so what are you waiting for? Want to be famous and make significant history? Grow a beard!

April 28th, 2008 · Comments (24)

Binary kid

Yesterday, I took two of my children to the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem. This was the second time, my small son, Tony, was there. First time he was 5 years old. Today he’s 7. Following the dialog was there, when we saw machine code emulator (binary calculator)

Tony: Daddy, now I know why you and mommy call me “binary kid”

Me: Why?

Tony (with enthusiasm): ‘cos I was born on January 1st – there are only 1 and 0 in my birthday date

Me: You also born on 2001, thus in short format it’s 01-01-01

Tony: Wait a minute (doing something in binary machine). It’s 21! But it’s broken…

Me: Why?

Tony: You so silly. It’s because it cannot understand first 0!

Me: You can try another direction

Tony (doing some complicated calculations with binary machine): Now much better – 41! This number it bigger, then 21. But it’ still bad!

Me: Why?

Tony: Because it is not an even binary!

Me: WHAT? (he saw ASCII chart for binaries)

Tony: I cannot make even one character from my birthday

Me: Try to put two zeros at the end

Tony: Wow, it’s ת (hebrew letter “tav” – equivalent of T in ascii code), so funny!

Me: Why?

Tony: Because this machine does not know, that my name starts with ט (hebrew “tet” – equivalent of Y in ascii code)

Me: Try to see this chart (I show him IPA chart)

Tony: Wow I just used wrong crib. Now it’s ok. This machine is really smart

April 26th, 2008 · Comments (1)

Yet other large industrial area switched to Vista

I do not think, it’s necessary to explain that. Those photos took in large industrial area in center region of Israel. A picture worth a hundred words…

… and a little zoom

Long life, Microsoft Windows Vista…

March 3rd, 2008 · Comments (3)

The strangest office, I ever worked in

What the strangest place, you worked in? Post your photo of strangest places to comments.

February 14th, 2008 · Comments (6)

MacBook Air is small, but handy?

Do you really think, that MacBook Air is the smallest and most comfortable notebook in the world? Not really. Matin, make it much more useful (not only notebooks). Does he?

February 3rd, 2008 · Comments (2)

RTFM – Not only software needs manual, kids need it too – How to care your child (visual instructions)

For all my friends, become fathers and mothers within last couple of months. Please, read it before using your kids! All images are from Safe Baby Handling Tips (more fun stuff inside) by Running Press Books. Author’s website

There are more images here, we just waiting for author’s authorization to publish it.

January 25th, 2008 · Comments (8)

Don’t show this again!

One of greatest and most informative message boxes, I ever see. Here comes the king. Well, it’s from beta Expression product.

January 22nd, 2008 · Comments (2)